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Re: Is it time to abandon Dpkg?

'Lars Wirzenius wrote:'
>
>Ian Jackson:
>> Red Hat probably think these are just overcomplications, however, it
>> is these features that allow us to do an in-place and/or partial
>> upgrade without taking the system right down to do it.
>
>This sounds conclusive, though a more detailed argument would
>be nice (something for the FAQ, perhaps). Especially examples
>of situations where dpkg works better than RPM. (Ian: I'm not
>asking you do this, but it would be nice to have it, I'm sure
>you'll agree.)

I think I have publically posted rpm's shortcomings many times.
Briefly,
 - No conffiles so it hoses your /etc configs EVERY time[1]
 - No pre-dependencies so your system can get hosed when upgrading
   major versions of shared libs like going to glibc (Red Hat avoided
   this problem when they went from 2.? (a.out) to 3.? (ELF) by saying
   the packaging format is not backward compatible, we're sorry --
   this decision made it possible for them to beat everyone else to
   market in getting an all ELF distribution).
 - No (real) configuration scripts so /usr/info/dir is empty and
   sendmail and apache and etc., have static configs
 - rpm -U won't upgrade a currently installed package and other
   infelicities in the low-level UI of rpm
 - Requires a boot floppy to upgrade so upgrades over a network are
   risky (they work but Red Hat doesn't support it and warns against it)
 - networking startup code is buried beneath several layers of scripts
   which call bash functions that have obscure names like "daemon" and no
   documentation.  Which makes reconfiguring them a project (and it's
   fruitless anyway since everything in /etc gets hosed by your next
   upgrade[1]).
 - ancient version of /usr/bin/mt so I had to copy my Debian binary
 - No diald package, so I had to port Debians
 - No squid package, so I don't run squid on that network yet :(

[1] At least they create a backup as filename.rpmsave.  But until you
can fix the problem sendmail will bounce all your customers mail (at
least that was the effect on my clients network)

Etc, etc,

The latest version of rpm is bazingly fast compared to dpkg.  That is
perhaps the only advantage of rpm that comes to mind.

Red Hat's advantages are they are a good company supporting free
software, they have a slick X-based UI to rpm, and they offer some
(small) amount of commercial support (but they don't support INN, for
example, not even with their "full" support contract).

I don't think RPM or Red Hat is "bad".  I just think they are aiming
for mass market and have cut too many corners for those of us who demand
the best.  Which right now is dpkg and Debian.

QED.

-- 
Christopher J. Fearnley            |    Linux/Internet Consulting
cjf@netaxs.com, cjf@onit.net       |    UNIX SIG Leader at PACS
http://www.netaxs.com/~cjf         |    (Philadelphia Area Computer Society)
ftp://ftp.netaxs.com/people/cjf    |    Design Science Revolutionary
"Dare to be Naive" -- Bucky Fuller |    Explorer in Universe


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